Bhagat Singh Thind

Bhagat Singh Thind (3 October 1892-15 September 1967) was an Indian-American World War I veteran who, in 1923, was denied citizenship after a US Supreme Court case which ruled that, as his Aryan ancestors had diluted their racial purity by intermarrying with local Indians, Thind was not a white man as he had claimed.

Biography
Bhagat Singh Thind was born in Taragarh Talawa, Punjab, British India in 1892 to a Sikh family, and he came to the United States for college in 1913. In 1918, he was recruited into the US Army during World War I, and he was honorably discharged on 16 December 1918 with the rank of Sergeant; he was the first turbaned soldier to serve in the US Army. Thind then married a white woman and applied for citizenship in Washington, but, at the time, only free white men or African-Americans could become naturalized citizens. His citizenship was revoked four days after it was granted to him on 9 December 1918, and he received citizenship a second time 11 months later, leading to the Immigration and Naturalization Service appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and resulting in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. He argued that he was a white man, as he claimed that the Punjabis were descended from the Aryans, a Caucasian group who migrated through Central Asia and into India. However, the government argued that Aryans had intermarried with local Indians and therefore diluted their white ancestry, rendering Thind a non-citizen in 1926. In 1936, he became a citizen a third time in New York, and he became a Sikh spiritual writer and philosopher. He died in Los Angeles in 1967 at the age of 74.